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Aces of Trades – Little Arrows Play Café

Drew Bracken, Correspondent
Published 7:19 a.m. ET Oct. 1, 2018

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Dave Warner, director of Little Arrows Play Café in downtown Newark. Parents can come and let their children play in a safe area while they can sit and have conversations. There is also tutoring available for teen parents, and regular bible studies. (Photo11: Jessica Phelps/The Advocate)Buy Photo

NEWARK – Dave Warner stays busy. He’s the associate pastor at Marne United Methodist Church, he’s the pastor of Engage Newark, and since July of 2017 he’s been the director of Little Arrows Play Café.

“The idea for Little Arrows Play Cafe was birthed in 2014,” he said. “We received an invitation to do some sort of community give-back or ministry in the old Union Square Block on Church Street.”

“I had a relationship with Tom Atha through music and his recording studio,” Warner further explained, “and he was working to purchase that property. He relayed a story to me about a loved one of his who was a single mom working on her nursing degree and he said she would take her 3-year-old son to [a restaurant playground] to occupy him while she studied. And he asked me a question I will never forget: ‘Can the church do better?’”

Atha the former president of the Downtown Newark Association and now the owner of Thirty One West, a live music venue in Newark since 2016, remembers the conversation well.

“That woman in the story is now my fiancée,” he said. “That’s what prompted my question to Dave.”

“So we started dreaming,” Warner continued, “and asking how the church can do better. We wanted to create a space where the people of Jesus could provide for the needs of single parents and couples and grandparents raising kids to be able to do work, play, relax, meet for studies and simply have safe social space. After several years waiting and working on our space to be renovated, we opened Little Arrows in July of 2017.”

Warner, now 40, grew up on a small farm in Croton – “home of the Hartford Fair!” as he exclaimed.

“As a child,” he continued, “I had a dream to preach on Sunday and farm the rest of the week. My 5-year old logic declared that farmers don’t work on Sundays and preachers only work on Sundays! Needless to say, I have since learned otherwise.”

Warner went to Licking County Christian Academy in Heath, graduating in 1996. He earned a degree in church music at Mount Vernon Nazarene College in 2000. He then got his master’s in ministerial leadership from Wesley Seminary in Indiana in 2010.

“I resisted becoming a pastor for a while,” he explained. “Having a degree in music got me into the church professionally, but I really wanted to try to make my way to Nashville. But God had other plans.”

“About a month after I received my first worship leading position in Beavercreek (near Dayton),” he recalled, “the full-time youth pastor left. The senior pastor of that church approached me to apply for the position with these words, ‘You’re young, how about you do it?’ So I said what every Christian says when they don’t want to do something: ‘I’ll pray about it.’ But I accepted that position and started to dearly love pastoral care.”

Now, in addition to the Marne church and Engage Newark, Warner spends much of his time at Little Arrows Play Café.

“They’re living up to the question,” Atha said. “They can do it better. They’re enhancing peoples’ lives in our community while also serving what is a pretty simple need, which is to make kids smile.”

“And on top of that,” he concluded, “they’re helping folks in a really creative way.”

For more:

Little Arrows Play Café is located at 29 West Church Street in Newark. For more information, call 740-348-5661 or log on www.laplaycafe.com.

Aces of Trades is a weekly series focusing on people and their jobs – whether they’re unusual jobs, fun jobs or people who take ordinary jobs and make them extraordinary. If you have a suggestion for a future profile, let us know at advocate@newarkadvocate.com or 740-328-8821.